Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam? 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

My first thought when reading the The Federalist article by Jordan Davidson was how distorted, how egocentric, how self-serving, and how demented the worldview of Nikole Hannah-Jones is (thanks to Instapundit's Ed Driscoll and Stephen Green).

Speaking of delusional, I am reluctant to share my second thought because it sounds like conspiracy theory, but it cannot escape my mind.

My second thought, then, was to ask whether it could be possible that the founder of the 1619 Project ever was, and perhaps still is, a member of, or is/was at least influenced by, the Nation of Islam. "Barbaric devils" is typical Farrakhan-speak for whites, after all, and the "argument" (sic) of calling all who disagree "racist" and "liar" comes directly from Louis Farrakhan's playbook. To believe that Africans crossed the ocean to help the Aztecs build their pyramids is a typically deluded Farrakhan narrative. (Incidentally, that scenario also resembles those of the Scientology movement, which ought to be mentioned because Farrakhan has lavished Dianetics with praise, calling for all whites to ditch their mainstream churches for the L Ron Hubbard creed.)

Meanwhile, the quest for reparations, or  for contributions, or for a tax, from

The concealment of links to Louis
Farrakhan is hardly unheard of

unbelievers or infidels (dhimmis, regularly described by such terms as "pigs" and "devils") is not unheard of, far from it, in Islam. As for the destruction of statues, nobody can deny that that has been par for the course for Muslims since the time of Mohamed. Of course, the former Nicole Hannah may simply be an agnostic or an atheist non-follower who simply is fond of, indeed delighted about, the Reverend Farrakhan's teachings. This, incidentally, can only lead to another inescapable question: How about Black Lives Matter? How much influence or backing, if any, did Louis Farrakhan and/or the Nation of Islam have in its creation?

My third thought was, how on earth can such a sizeable part of the American population allow for such a distorted view of their country to become commonplace? Is this a takeover of American institutions — especially American education — by neo-Marxists, or by radical Islamists, or by both?

My final thought, how can the mainstream media (a media that is at once delusional and cynical, systematically using the NOI terms "racist" and "liar" about anyone who loves America and treating Republicans like unwashed kafirs, who ought to shut up, straighten up, and get up on the bandwagon) — especially the so-called newspaper of record — allow such a prominent place (directly on its staff, in the case of the the "New Woke Times") for a person (who may, or may be not, if not close to radical Islam, then heavily influenced by it) to allow her self-serving, her delusional, and her demented view of American history (as well as world history) to qualify as school material?

Equally important: Does the "college campus paper" have any knowledge of any allegiance, past or present, and however small, Nikole Hannah-Jones ever had to the Nation of Islam? If so — if for instance "Nicole Hannah" used to be a member during her college days or at least attended a service occasionally — why would a(n obviously brief) mention of that be hidden from the public in her biography?

It is one thing to say that the whites are "barbaric devils" and that Columbus is Hitler; it is another to say (this usually means you have gone off the deep end) that Africans crossed the Atlantic (with the Ashanti Navy?) before said Columbus, and that they helped the Aztecs build their pyramids…

As Tyler O'Neil puts it:

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the founder of The New York Times‘ “1619 Project,” showed her true colors in a racist letter to the editor … in 1995. …  Is it any surprise that the Notre Dame sophomore who wrote that “white America’s dream is colored America’s nightmare” would later go on to lead The New York Times in a project to redefine American history, centering the founding on the arrival of the first black slaves in 1619, rather than on the Declaration of Independence in 1776? 

While discussing the proposition that the 1619 Project is more part of a cult than anything else (certainly anything reasonable, historical, or the least intellectual), the Federalist's Mark Hemingway notes that

James Baldwin … astutely dissects the appeal of the Nation of Islam to black Americans — a topic that’s suddenly become relevant again.

Just read what Nicole Hannah wrote in 1995:

Nikole Hannah-Jones, [later] the lead essayist on New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, wrote a letter to the editor in Notre Dame’s The Observer stating that “the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.”

Hannah-Jones claimed that the actions of European settlers and explorers such as Christopher Columbus were “acts of devils” and likens them to Hitler.

“[The whites] lasting monument was the destruction and enslavement of two races of people,” Hannah-Jones wrote.

Hannah-Jones claims Africans arrived in North America long before Europeans, but that unlike Europeans, Africans befriended and traded with the indigenous people. She claims pyramids in Mexico are a symbol of said friendship.

 … The Times did not respond to a request for comment on whether their employee maintained these beliefs.

 … This isn’t the first time the New York Times has hired and kept a writer with a history of racism and radical views. In 2018, the NYT hired Sarah Jeong despite a long string of racist tweets that littered her Twitter calling white people “goblins,” likening their smell to dogs, and asking to “#cancelallwhitepeople”.

 … Hannah-Jones’s latest piece for the New York Times Magazine calls for race-based reparations.

RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

• From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

• Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be"

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

• Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

• "Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• When was the last time protests in America were marred by police violence? 1970, according to Ann Coulter, who asks "Can we restrict wild generalizations about the police to things that have happened in our lifetimes?" (Compare with, say, China…)

• The Secret About Black Lives Matter; In Fact, the Outfit's Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

• Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619